‘I wonder sometimes if the teacher is not the real student and beneficiary’ (George Steiner)
Learning to live out of control, learning to live without trying to force contingency into conformity because of our desperate need for security, I take to be a resource for discovering alternatives that would otherwise not be present.
Stanley Hauerwas, Hannah’s Child: A Theologian’s Memoir
I don’t think that violence is Christian. … the very essence of Christianity is the cross. It is through the cross that we will change.
Walter Wink, Jesus and Nonviolence: A Third Way
Faith in God means believing that anyone can be transformed, regardless of the past.
Walter Wink, Jesus and Nonviolence: A Third Way
There is … no other way to God for our time but through the enemy, for loving the enemy has become the key both to human survival in the age of terror and to personal transformation.
Walter Wink, Jesus and Nonviolence: A Third Way
Even if nonviolent action does not immediately change the heart of the oppressor, it does affect those committed to it. As Martin Luther King Jr. attested, it gives them new self-respect and calls up resources of strength and courage they did not know they had.
Walter Wink, Jesus and Nonviolence: A Third Way
Annie Dillard again, this time on reading and a good life:
There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by. A life of good days lived in the senses is not enough. The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less; time is ample and its passage sweet. Who would call a day spent reading a good day? But a life spent reading – that is a good life.
From The Writing Life
Karl Möller 